Tebow is silencing his critics - 'He looks like a different guy'
It wasn’t all that long ago that Tim Tebow was treated as a laughingstock by mainstream sports media such as ESPN and Sports Illustrated.
Sports Illustrated claimed that his first-ever season as a minor league baseball player “ended in disastrous fashion.”
ESPN called Tebow’s baseball career a “relentless pursuit of failure.”
These days? There hasn’t been much of a peep about Tebow’s baseball career, mainly because it’s been neither “disastrous” nor a “failure.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean ESPN and SI are willing to offer much in terms of any sort of praise for Tebow.
But just because the mainstream sports media want to ignore the rather impressive story of a football player ably transitioning to a completely different athletic career at the ripe age of 30, it doesn’t mean his peers haven’t taken notice.
“He looks like a different guy than last year,” Double-A Hartford Yard Goats manager Warren Schaeffer told the New York Post.
Imagine that. An athletic prospect has managed to improve significantly in his second full year of baseball. It’s a good thing the “experts” at ESPN and SI gave him the time to grow before outright dismissing him.
To be fair, Tebow’s numbers still aren’t screaming “guaranteed major league call-up.” But hitting .256 with five home runs and 27 RBIs through Monday is nothing to sneeze at.
Tebow’s strikeout rate is still an issue, but he’s shown a marked improvement in terms of getting on base. He’s reached in 11 of his last 15 games with the Binghamton Rumble Ponies.
#Mets OF @TimTebow homered today. He's now hitting .304 in June for @RumblePoniesBB.
▶️: https://t.co/NcY2THdU1n pic.twitter.com/txMF7Raa4w
— Minor League Baseball (@MiLB) June 23, 2018
Helping Tebow reach base so consistently is his recent hot bat, as he has been hitting .321 in his last 18 games.
“I saw him last year [playing for the Single-A Columbia Fireflies]. He’s come a really long way,” Schaeffer said. “He’s a tough out right now. We had a really tough time against Tim Tebow. He hits fastballs well. He’s a strong kid. His approach has gotten a lot better. He’s spitting on pitches now he wasn’t early on this year. You can tell he works hard.”
Schaeffer also said Tebow is no longer the easy read he used to be in his rookie season.
“Before, you could beat him with a lot of stuff,” the Hartford manager said. “You beat him hard in, beat him soft away. He had a quite a few holes [in his swing] earlier on. Now the holes have gotten smaller and smaller.”
Another Eastern League manager, John Schneider of the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, also praised Tebow’s improved batting mechanics.
“To hold your own after being out of it for however long he had been, you got to give the guy credit,” Schneider said. “Baseball is a hard thing and hitting is a really hard thing. To show improvement and hold his own here in Double-A is pretty impressive.”
Unsurprisingly, Tebow has also made a big impression on his teammates.
“He’s there for the right reasons,” New York Mets reliever Tyler Bashlor, who was just recently called up from the Rumble Ponies, said. “He’s trying to do what we all strive to do — make it here.”
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